Sitcom Android 13
by nedthejanitor
Summary: Three androids. One apartment. My second attempt at the same damn apartment idea with this show. Androids 13-15, having been woken up by an electrical storm that erased their primary objectives, find themselves wandering aimlessly through life like most of the humans they so denigrate for being weak and squishy. And also HIJINX. OF THE WACKY VARIETY.
1. Pilot

SUPER ANDROID 13:  
THE SITCOM PILOT

 _*please place your own laugh track, cheers, boos, "awws" and clapping sounds where applicable*_

In Upper West City sits the dirtiest, cheapest apartment complex this side of a pile of cardboard boxes glued together with used condoms. Called "The Fix," it is a place where the roaches outnumber the denizens by a ratio of a zillion-to-one. Or, just for the sake of a visual, the place has less oxygen molecules than roaches. Opening one's mouth and inhaling in this place is like playing Russian Roulette, only every chamber of the gun has a bullet, and the bullets are swarms of cockroaches. I mean, really, just stick your head in some mud and breathe in as hard as you can. You're not far off.

There's only one three-bedroom apartment in the entire complex—the management doesn't believe in odd numbers—and in this apartment resides the three dirtiest, cheapest apartment tenants this side of making robots out of a pile of used condoms and cardboard boxes. They are an elite squad known as the Special Robots Unit. These are their stories.

*GONG GONG*

"Hey, 14," shouted a small, purple Android from his room, which stank unbelievably of beer and motor oil. "You ever gonna watch anything in your damn life besides Law and Order: SVU?!"

Android 14, a large, shirtless man-droid with long, black, shirtless hair, didn't respond immediately. So the purple robot called out again. "14! We have a big-ass shelf of bargain bin movies right next to the TV, you don't have to watch SVU every waking moment of your damn sleepless life! The least you can do is watch C-SPAN if you're wanting to see nothin' but unlikable humans shouting at each other! At least that shit pretends to be important!"

"15," 14 finally spoke, "you could just close your door if you don't like to watch."

"The roaches ate the damn door last week!" 15 snapped. "And this week! And the week before, too! Come on, man, the hell you been?!"

"Sleeping in my room, where I have a door."

"You made it out of roaches!"

"Either make another door or quit complaining."

"Make another door?! Out of what?! Roaches?!"

"Yep. That's called bootstrapping, 15."

15 pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stop himself from saying something stupid. Since he just so happened to be Android 15, this was impossible. "Can you at least turn it down? Or off, since, y'know, I'm asking nicely?"

After a long pause, he heard the volume decrease very, very slightly. It might not have even gone down at all—he could have just imagined it. But Android 15 was in no mood to continue the argument as he refocused his small be-hatted head back to the matter at hand; this damn job application. There was a question on it that had him baffled to absolutely no end. "If you were to be a food, which one would you be and why?"

"Why the hell they askin' me this?" 15 said in a quiet voice. "I don't even eat damn food. All I do is drink booze and bathe in motor oil. These motherfuckers ought to be lucky I'm even applyin'. Damn Natural Grocers, askin' me to name a food."

It didn't occur to him that the Natural Grocers put the question on there to have a little bit of fun with him. 15 was all business, all the time, 24/7/365, or 366 if it was a leap year. If he were to ever go to school, he would fail recess, because he don't play. Of course, it also didn't occur to him that he was utterly and completely unemployable, being a 2-foot-tall purple robot with a potty mouth, no work experience to speak of, and debilitating alcoholism. The fact that he was technically less than a decade old was also a pertinent issue. Of course, all that shit didn't stop Android 13, the redneck muscle at the head of their power trio. 13 managed to weasel his way onto a drilling rig, and 15's best guess was the accent got him the job.

"I bet I could be a damn tool-pusher too if I sounded like Jed Clampett," groused 15, tossing the job application across the room, where it promptly exploded. "Damn it!" Sometimes he forgot about his amazing super strength, just like he'd wait at a bus stop for several minutes before remembering he could fly. Integrating oneself into the world of humans was tough business, but somebody had to do it, otherwise they'd have to figure out why they were built in the first place. Unfortunately, the lightning strike that woke them prematurely knocked their brains out of whack, and only 13 was barely able to remember something from their prior programming. And so, here they were, trying to punch their way through what felt like an endless series of dead ends. Dead ends that seemed to be the very few things that wouldn't go down after just one hit.

After putting out the fire he started by throwing a job application—a fire that left behind a hole that could best be described as "Old Faithful, but with cockroaches"—Android 15 decided it was time for a good old fashioned marathon drinking session. He could feel his poor, overworked circuits writhing like earthworms already beneath his fake skin, just crackling with foam power. It was beer o'clock, just like the hour before and the hour before that hour, and every hour that would ensue after this one, all the way until the end of time.

"I thought you hated this show," said Android 14 after 15 sat down next to him, a twelve-pack in hand. "If you think I'm changing the channel for you, you've got a lot messed up."

"About 5 or 6 of these, and I won't even notice it," said 15, holding up a can of beer triumphantly.

"You need 6 beers to watch Law and Order?"

"Hell no! 6 twelve-packs!"

Android 14 nodded sagely. "Ah. Now that sounds like the Android 15 I know. For a second there, I thought you were trying to pussy it up or something. 5 or 6 cans to you at this point must be like a toddler pissing on a forest fire—just nothing."

"You got that right." Android 15 slurped a couple down, thought for a second, then said, "Darn tootin', hoss."

And so, for the next half-hour, almost every line of SVU was punctuated with the sound of another beer tab popping. From short sentences to long monologues, 15 got 'em all covered. At the commercial break, 14 looked down to see the veritable ocean of cans and empty boxes littering the floor, the older ones becoming animated with an invasion of cockroaches.

"I'm sorry, but I just gotta ask: do you ever feel like these bugs, 15?"

15 looked somewhat taken aback. He tossed aside his last-emptied can and folded his arms all thinkfully and shit. "What the hell you talkin' about?"

"It's just that we don't seem to have any kind of direction in our lives. There's nothing we do that really matters. We merely exist, as little more than drops in an ocean, blending into a flat, bland, endless universe."

"I guarantee you if three of those drops of water started flying around, lifting construction vehicles and blowing up buildings with laser beams, those drops wouldn't seem so damn bland to anyone else," 15 said between cans. "You're thinkin' all negative, 14, and there's no point to it. If nothing we do matters, we might as well do what we want, right?"

"I don't know what I want, and that's the problem."

"Shit! What do you mean, you don't know? You want to watch SVU and argue with me about some kind of hill-of-beans crap. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. Any of these scrubs out there, these humans, would kill to have the Superman powers we got. We can make mountains disappear, 14! All we gotta do is figure out what we want to do with those mountains!"

Before 14 could formulate much of a response to his roommate, the show came back on. But then, just as the identity of the rapist was set to be revealed, there was a knock on the door.

"Oh, hell, you have to get it," said 15, dropping his drink on the floor carelessly. "I'm more booze than gears and circuits right now, man, I could vomit any second out of a stomach I ain't even got."

14 muttered curses under his breath and muted the television. "Who is it?" he asked the door, and it answered. "It's Clair, from the Leasing Office! You're getting behind on the rent and I need to do an inspection anyway!"

15 scrambled to pick up the cans and boxes off the floor as 14 turned the door knob. If she opened the door and saw all the beer, she'd think all the rent money got spent on it. Of course, that wasn't true—he stole every bit of it. But the notion would be enough to make her lose her mind and kick them out.

"Hahaha!"

15 stopped. All the dots instantly connected—Clair was never at the door.

"13, you bastard," 14 sighed, relieved enough to be clutching a heart that, again, he hadn't even been built with.

"Ha, well, it was real simple, my fellow mechanical friend," 13 said as he tossed his hardhat on the floor and shut the door behind him, "all I did was make my voice as bitchy-sounding as possible, and bingo, all the damn stars aligned. I tell you—ain't nothin' funnier than what I just did. Nothin'. I could hear 15 scrambling around, trying to pick up all those cans, trying not to touch the roaches—I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from laughin' and givin' myself away!"

"Ha ha ha," laughed 15 sarcastically, "I'm glad givin' me a motherfuckin' heart attack is your way of amusing yourself. Glad to know I'm useful in that way."

"What's that you're muttering about back there, 15?" 13 asked with faux-niceness while seating himself on the couch. 15 said nothing. "Yeah, thought so, 15."

The three androids hung out in silence for a bit. Then 13 snapped his fingers. "Say, I have an idea for how we can get money. Get this—robbery!"

 **TBC**


	2. The Heist-Planning Chapter

That night, the three androids stood on the roof of the building directly across from a bank 13 had said was the perfect target. 14 and 15 looked on, a note of deep skepticism on the latter's face.

"So why the hell is this place supposed to be so special again?"

"Simple!" said 13 in reply, as if he'd been waiting all his life for somebody to ask him that question. "You see, it has an easily accessible ventilation shaft that exits close enough to the bank vault that we would barely have to step foot within the actual bank—"

"Why don't we just blast up the place and take what we want?" 15 asked. "Who's gonna stop us?"

"Why, hell, it ain't about being stopped, 15, it's about being pursued by the bastards in the first place! Shit, do you want to have a bunch of yankees following you around for the rest of your life?"

"That's another thing we need to talk about," said 15, "you gotta stop calling everyone and everything you don't like a 'yankee.' It's getting way the hell out of control. I swear to God, the other day I heard you call a sno-cone you were eating a yankee."

"I thought that was a dream," 14 said, surprised. "That actually happened?"

"Yeah, I was there, I saw that shit."

13 crossed his arms. "What my programming tells me to do is none of your damn business, and that applies to your damn yankee dreams as well."

"See?!" 15 yelled. "There you go again with that shit!"

"No, I—" 13 put his hand up to his mouth. "My God. I don't even realize it when I'm doing it!"

"That's some scary shit, man," 15 said, shaking his head. "Man, how much of the shit we do is even us? Like, free will and shit."

"Well…" 14 said cautiously, "15, I have noticed that you like to say the word 'shit' a lot. Do you think…?"

15 looked up at 14 with the terrified wonderment of a child facing down a stranger. Then he grabbed his head and screamed like his teeth had all sprouted legs and ripped themselves out of his gums, which Dr. Gero probably did program them with the capability of doing. "MY MIND! NOTHING IS SACRED ANYMORE!"

"See, now look what you gone and done," 13 complained. "Now he's having an existential crisis, and we're in the middle of planning a bank heist! 14, you really need to learn to be silent when it's the best time for you to shut up!"

"I can't help it if I'm quiet a lot," said 14 in a low voice he usually reserved for, well, every occasion imaginable. "It's in my programming."

As the two of them talked, 15 continued to scream and hold his head all dramatically like he was trying to squeeze all the juice out of his head, which is impossible for him since he's a robot, unless Dr. Gero made a robot out of a juicer, which is insane but well within the confines of the doctor's fevered imagination.

"God," 13 finally said while in the middle of his conversation with 15 about his third least-favorite pizza parlor, "can you get up there and shut up that damn purple android? He's giving me a yankee-sized headache."

"Sure."

14 flew up to where 15 was in the middle of his midair freakout session and turned him so they were facing each other. He then proceeded to slap him repeatedly in the face until his hardware was so rattled and brain so dazed that he couldn't remember what it was in hell he was ever complaining about.

"There," said 13 as 14 landed and 15 slowly descended unconsciously, clutching his head for an entirely different reason now, "now where were we? Oh, yeah: I think their mushrooms are pretty—"

"With all due respect, 13," said 14, "we're supposed to be talking about this bank robbery idea of yours. Are we ever going to get back to that?"

"Oh, sure," said 13. "So, we're going to sneak into the back area of the bank, where the employees typically go for break, just before closing time. I think we might be able to hide behind the vending machines. Then, when the coast is clear, we go through the vent shaft leading from that room to the entrance of the bank vault. We break in, get the money, and get the hell out before anyone's any the wiser."

"Question."

"Yes, 15?"

"No. I'm not doing that."

"That wasn't a question. Maybe you should've waited until your head cleared up before you tried to speak."

"Maybe I should've didn't, but that's not the issue at hand. You need to understand, man, it's simple. We just go in there and take the damn money!"

"15, we've been over this. Yankees. I needn't elaborate further."

"No, dude, we do it at night! We do it when everyone's gone, then no one will know we did it!"

13 scratched his chin. "That's interesting. I never did look at it from that angle. I got to admit, 15, maybe those smacks upside your head were exactly what you needed to get you straight thinking."

"No, they hurt like hell is what they did," said 15. "Come on, let's get back to the roaches, I need to take a nap."

"'Get back to the roaches?'" repeated 14. "Are you talking about the apartment?"

"What the hell else could I be talking about? God, could you go softer on my head next time around? I feel like you done dribbled me like a damn basketball!"

"Ooh," 14 said, "that's a really good idea. Hey, if you ever get into another 'existential crisis,' let me know so I can try that."

"…I have no idea why I continue to live with you people, y'know?"

13 draped his luggy arm over the smaller android's shoulders and said, "because you're too goddamn purple for anyone else to put up with you, that's why!" And so they sitcom-laughed all the way back home.

 **TBC**


End file.
